Longtime soap "As the World Turns" comes to a halt this week

The scene, which aired live in black and white, would have long ago been forgotten if a CBS News bulletin had not interrupted "As the World Turns" that day at 1:40 p.m., nine minutes and 58 seconds into the broadcast.

Original cast members of "As the World Turns": Rosemary Prinz, Helen Wagner, Richard Holland and Don MacLaughlin.

Nancy Hughes, played by Helen Wagner, was chatting with her father-in-law, "Grandpa" (Santos Ortega), about how her son Bob (Don Hastings) had invited his ex-wife for Thanksgiving dinner — because he said he didn't want her to eat alone on the holiday.

Future Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei got her start on the show as Marcy Thompson.

On Nov. 22, 1963, "As the World Turns" was seven years old and the most watched daytime drama in America. It would live on for almost another 47 years, and weather a succession of eras in American history, from the Cold War into the Internet age.

But the end is now near. Last December, CBS announced it was shutting down "ATWT." The final (13,858th) episode, taped on June 23 at its Brooklyn studios, will air Friday, ending the storied run of a daytime legend.

"It's been around for 54 years. In this day and age, you're lucky if a show goes five years," says Marie Wilson, who has played Meg Snyder since 2005, shuttling between Parsippany and Los Angeles during that time. "When something like that ends, it's like the end of an era. It's very heartbreaking."

The late Irna Phillips created "ATWT" as a sister show for "Guiding Light," which had its last airing, after 72 years (on radio and TV), last Sept. 18. Both shows eventually succumbed to sagging ratings, changing times, the proliferation of viewer choices and so-called "reality" series, which also deal in serialized story lines and colorful characters.

"The No. 1 factor is money. Reality shows are basically soap operas, and they're cheaper to produce," says Bergen County resident Terri Colombino, who had played Katie Peretti since 1998. "If you're going to the store [to buy] an apple and there's one for $1 and there's one for $500, which one are you going to buy? …

"We have such a huge cast. It takes so much money to produce these shows every day," Colombino says.

What's more, Wilson notes, with so many women now in the workforce, there are fewer people home watching daytime TV.

How different things were on April 2, 1956, when "ATWT" debuted, one of the first two soaps to run a half-hour rather than 15 minutes. (The other, "The Edge of Night," bowed the same day.)

Set in the fictional Oakdale, Ill., "ATWT," which expanded to an hour in 1975, chronicled the trials and tribulations of the Snyder, Hughes, Ryan and Montgomery families. It aimed for less melodrama, and more realism in dialogue and character development, than many other soaps. And the key to the show's longevity was its "message of survival in families when crisis comes," says Martha Byrne, the Waldwick native who played Lily Walsh Snyder for a total of 19 years, between 1985 and 2008.

"It was an identifiable show. It was always about family, and when we did shows that weren't about family is when the fans reacted in a negative way," says Byrne, who also played Lily's twin sister, Rose, from 2000 to 2005. "In soap operas you deal with the extremes of family issues and drama. … No one's been kidnapped seven times like I've been, but I'm sure people watched to see how I would get out of those situations. … You could relate to it in some way."

And even in extreme circumstances, Byrne says, she aimed to make her character's ordeal as realistic as possible, so fans would not wonder, for example, "Why does she have a French manicure when she's been tied up in a basement for eight days?"

For Kelley Menighan Hensley of Old Tappan, who has played Emily Stewart since 1992, that realism took getting used to. The actress, who'd grown up on ABC soaps and had never seen "ATWT," checked it out before testing for the show.

"I turned on an episode, and it happened to be a scene in the Snyder kitchen, which I thought was the strangest thing I had ever seen on a daytime soap opera," she says. "I grew up watching 'All My Children,' and … it was all about mansions and fancy clothes and there's this Snyder kitchen that looks like it's dated from the 1950s. I thought, what did I get myself into?"

Hensley, who met her husband, actor Jon Hensley (Holden Snyder), on "ATWT," came to love being part of the show. She got to work with long-timers like Marie Masters (Susan Stewart), Kathryn Hays (Kim Hughes), Eileen Fulton (Lisa Grimaldi), Don Hastings (Dr. Bob Hughes) and the aforementioned Helen Wagner, who died on May 1. Wagner spoke the very first line of the series ("Good morning, dear").

"For as old as she was when she finally passed, she could tell you anything about our show," Hensley says.

Wagner was the one Cronkite interrupted when CBS News cut into the program several times before going to wall-to-wall coverage of JFK's assassination. Hastings was also in scenes that day, and he recently shared his recollections with Colombino.

"When they cut in, everybody in the booth knew because they could see the TV, [but] they didn't tell the actors, because they had to come right back and finish the scenes and they knew how devastated the actors would be," Colombino says, adding that Hastings said that the cast learned later that day.